The exterminator is here. I told him that I'm extremely phobic, and asked him to please just tell me as few details as possible that would let me avoid seeing or picturing anything. He seemed to understand. I'm waiting outside while he does whatever he's doing.

Yay! It should be straightforward for him to deal with any issues.

He did some stuff, and sealed up some gaps in the outside wall, and told me to avoid one closet, and he's coming back on Thursday.

That sounds nice and specific without being traumatizing. Are you over your stomach bug?

Pretty much over the stomach bug, I think. Still not totally better, but I ate some noodles and tofu for dinner, and my stomach isn't protesting.

The exterminator came again, and he said that everything should be OK now, and he's coming back once more next week.

Yay! It's good to hear it was handled quickly.

Just emailed the instructor for my genealogy class, asking for an extension for a day or two on the assignment due tonight, since I really haven't been able to concentrate on it as much as I should, with all the panic attacks I've been having. At the moment, maybe about 75% of it is written, and several of my footnotes are things like "Figure out how to cite probate file," and it desperately needs to be proofread because I know that I wasn't consistent about verb tenses, and the writing could stand to be polished a bit. (It was a fun assignment to write. We were supposed to use something from our own research. I've only got one branch of my family that's been in the US for long enough to use for this. I started with a woman -- the wife of one of my relatives -- who died in 1916, and nothing from her adult life shows her parents' names, or even directly states her maiden name. Her obituary mentioned two siblings, though, and so I researched them, and still no parents' names, but through them, I found the names of a few more siblings, and ended up with five siblings, with birth dates for each, but still no parents' names. But then I show that there's only one family in the 1860 census with five siblings with those names and ages, and so that gets the parents' names and some information about the parents.)

Wow, that sounds cool, Hil! Hope your instructor is chill about giving you a bit more time.

Stream of Consciousness from the Department of Where Did That Random Thought Come From?

The quote at the top on my last refresh was:

Very convincing. Makes me completely want to put myself under government control. Please take me to where you can make me unconscious and naked.

And it got me thinking of an incident with a former chiropractor. He did xrays of my spine, so I had taken off my shirt and bra and was wearing a hospital-type gown, and for whatever reason he came back to consult before I had the opportunity to put my things back on. And I finally had to make him leave so I could get re-dressed because for whatever reason, I was just feeling really...vulnerable?...exposed?...something. And he was genuinely bewildered by my extreme reaction. So I felt like that sort of reaction to nudity (or even just whatever you call that feeling of exposed-ness of being braless in an environment other than home or some other place of safety) seemed like more of a woman's thing. (Or is it just me?) So what do we think? Was Riley's line out of place for a healthy young man, or is it a more universal reaction to nudity than I realized?